PC Gamers: about 10 years ago....

[YoshiM]

Yesterday I was helping my parents haul some stuff out of their shed and I stumbled upon a box of magazines. I found an old EGM of mine (Oct. 1991-issue with a free Sega Force issue) and a bunch of PC Magazines. The dates of these magazines were from 1992 to 1993. For fun I snagged up an issue from 1993 (either January or March, can't remember) that tested 75 of the latest and fastest machines available.

486 DX2/66.

Yes friends, 10 years and maybe a few months ago the top of the line PCs were a screaming 66 MHz. I saw advertisements for a 486 SX 25 that sold for $1499. DX machines were pushing anywhere from $1,800 to $3,000. Some of the systems were even expandable to 256 MB of RAM. Hard drives weren't advertised in the Gigabyte range yet (and I know a 1 GB drive then was around $1,000). Very few laptops advertised were using 486 processors but instead were using higher end 386 processors. There were discussions on getting video cards that were VESA compatible along with the ability to be "Windows accelerators". There was also some chatter about Intel's new processor that would be coming out later that year: The Pentium 66 MHz. There was some discussion on how this processor with the same speed as the current 486 could be faster.

It's just mind boggling how in a short amount of time we went from 66 MHz "multimedia ready" PC to 3,000 MHz entertainment systems. I could probably say the same thing about, say 1980 to 1990 but to me the most obvious impact of the PC was definitely seen during this time frame.

Just figured I'd share that little nugget from the past.

[dreamcaster]

I remember getting our 286PC back in 1989. :D

5 1/4 inch disk drive, 89MB HDD, 2MB ram, 512k video - what a beast!

That's where gaming for me started...

Captain Comic, Vette, Tetris, SimCity and F-15 Strike Eagle 2 are where my fond memories began....

[Mayhem]

Dad got the first PC in the house back around 1991... at the time this really was cutting edge and did cost a bit...

486 DX25
4MB RAM
120MB HD
CD drive (yeah I know!)
5.25" drive
Soundblaster 16
15" monitor

It's still somewhere in the loft... though minus SB16 as I sold that off to a mate recently who wants it for his Vector MAME cab...

[YoshiM]

When it came to computers, I was never "with the times". My first IBM PC Compatible was an 8080 10 MHz with 640K of RAM, a 20 MB Hard drive, 3 1/2" & 5 1/4" floppies, no sound, a CGA/Hercules video card, DOS 3.3 and a 12" or 13" amber monitor. That was probably 1990/1991 when I got that and it was $500.

It wasn't until 1994 that I got a Packard Bell 486 SX 25 with 4 MB of RAM, a 200(?) MB Hard drive (200? What am I going to do with all that space?), 256 color VGA built in (I had to buy a video card for my 8088- $150 with monitor all used) and DOS 5/Windows 3.1. I think that was also like $500 (maxed my new Sears Charge up real quick).

Y'know, I miss the days of having to muck around with DOS trying to get a game to run with enough memory. Any o' you young'ns that just started with Windows have no idea how easy you got it with your automatic memory management, your plug and play, your Direct X...

[zmeston]

Y'know, I miss the days of having to muck around with DOS trying to get a game to run with enough memory. Any o' you young'ns that just started with Windows have no idea how easy you got it with your automatic memory management, your plug and play, your Direct X...

You MISS those days?! You, my friend, must seek counseling, IMMEDIATELY, before you start warmly reminiscining about waiting ten minutes for a Commdore 64 game to load...

-- Z.

[Arqueologia_Digital]

Captain Comic
And i thought i was the unique person that played that game!!!!...
Also Kyrandia saga, Maniac mansion, Sim city, Street fighter, Monkey island and a lot more!!!

[punkoffgirl]

Y'know, I miss the days of having to muck around with DOS trying to get a game to run with enough memory. Any o' you young'ns that just started with Windows have no idea how easy you got it with your automatic memory management, your plug and play, your Direct X...

Please, Grampa, tell us about the time you used a rotary dial phone! :D

[scooterb23]

before you start warmly reminiscining about waiting ten minutes for a Commdore 64 game to load...

Ah....I was just doing this earlier...I love the old Electronic Arts logo...

[Griking]

Please, Grampa, tell us about the time you used a rotary dial phone! :D


You know that you're getting old when you can say that you made use of the Atari 2600's color/B&W switch

[punkoffgirl]

It's not polite to call a lady "old"! Where are your manners? ;)

[zmeston]

before you start warmly reminiscining about waiting ten minutes for a Commdore 64 game to load...

Ah....I was just doing this earlier...I love the old Electronic Arts logo...

Which game were you loading -- er, playing? The C64 and Amiga are my favorite computer-game platforms, and I still have a stack of (non-pirated, amazingly) C64 discs. Seven Cities of Gold, M.U.L.E., Skate or Die, Robot Rascals -- good times, good times.

-- Z.

[YoshiM]

Y'know, I miss the days of having to muck around with DOS trying to get a game to run with enough memory. Any o' you young'ns that just started with Windows have no idea how easy you got it with your automatic memory management, your plug and play, your Direct X...

You MISS those days?! You, my friend, must seek counseling, IMMEDIATELY, before you start warmly reminiscining about waiting ten minutes for a Commdore 64 game to load...

-- Z.

There's a certain satisfaction when you are able to tweak your RAM so you could get about 600KB of RAM available for programs. With DOS, you could find out what wasn't working. In Windows there's stuff in the background you might not even know about that may be causing a program to hork up. DOS was the cryptic OS that people were scared of and seemed to see you as a pagan god when you could find their lost document when doing a DIR *.txt /s. My first "date", if you wanna call it that, was when an old friend (who is now my wife) need her computer fixed and I had to dink around in both DOS and Windows 3.11 INI scripts. Who said command code wasn't sexy?

Actually, I never really used a Commodore 64, I'm a CoCo guy. And I usually left the room when I was loading a program from tape, I ain't THAT sick. Though I COULD tell what was BASIC and what was machine language in a program by its sound over the tape. I'm better now. Really.



Please, Grampa, tell us about the time you used a rotary dial phone!

Well, little girl, why don't you sit on ol' granpa's lap and I'll tell ya...;)

1981 was the last time my family used a rotary phone. Got a cheesy pulse (not touch tone, pppppulse) phone with keypad built into the handset from some cigarette promo from whatever brand one of my parents was smoking.

[ventrra]

Hmm....I've got my Tandy 1000HX set up behind me. It had some amazing features: 256K of RAM!, 16 whole colors!, 720K Floppy drive!, and 3 voice sound!!! :D

... ...

As far as missing the days of DOS goes: If something was wrong while I was using something in DOS, it was usually pretty easy to track down and/or fix, now that I'm using windows for most things...well, it's not the same thing at all.

[scooterb23]

Which game were you loading -- er, playing?

Well, first it was Skate Or Die...and then I broke out Dr J. vs. Larry Bird Go One-On-One good stuff...

[zmeston]

My first "date", if you wanna call it that, was when an old friend (who is now my wife) need her computer fixed and I had to dink around in both DOS and Windows 3.11 INI scripts. Who said command code wasn't sexy?

Ahhh... okay. If I could have used my DOS knowledge as a means of meeting women, I would think fondly of those days, too. Heh.


Actually, I never really used a Commodore 64, I'm a CoCo guy. And I usually left the room when I was loading a program from tape, I ain't THAT sick. Though I COULD tell what was BASIC and what was machine language in a program by its sound over the tape. I'm better now. Really.

Strange that I'm wary of your DOS fondness, but find this particular skill of yours extremely cool.

-- Z.

[bargora]

I've actually GOT a rotary dial phone plugged in at my house right now. All interested ladies are invited over to see this wondrous artifact. ;)

[maxlords]

I too miss the days of DOS, where you could tweak a PC to do what you wanted to. With Windows, we lose TONS of control over our systems, and it requires far more power to run, sucking up resources left and right! Bleah! And back in 1991, my mom bought us a P90 with 16 megs of RAM and a 450 Meg hard drive....top of the line for $2000!!! Gah!

[YoshiM]

Actually, I never really used a Commodore 64, I'm a CoCo guy. And I usually left the room when I was loading a program from tape, I ain't THAT sick. Though I COULD tell what was BASIC and what was machine language in a program by its sound over the tape. I'm better now. Really.

Strange that I'm wary of your DOS fondness, but find this particular skill of yours extremely cool.

-- Z.[/quote]

Heh heh. It got it from my Dad. After he typed in a program from Rainbow magazine and it had some BASIC equivalent to machine language in it he'd be like "Hear it? That's that part I was having a lot of problems with." It's funky but makes sense that certain parts would sound different. We usually had the audio on so we could hear if there was a bad part in the tape of if something didn't record right.

@ventrra: I never owned one, but the Tandy PCs were actually pretty cool with having everything you needed all in one. They even had a PC that could hook up to your TV: it looked like an overgrown Color Computer but with a 5 1/4" drive on right side and it ran on DOS (no HD though).

[ventrra]

@ventrra: I never owned one, but the Tandy PCs were actually pretty cool with having everything you needed all in one. They even had a PC that could hook up to your TV: it looked like an overgrown Color Computer but with a 5 1/4" drive on right side and it ran on DOS (no HD though).
I've seen that, but I can't remember what it was. The computers that Tandy made weren't bad, but the cost of upgrading them was absurd. When I first got my 1000HX the cost of a second 720K floppy drive for a standard PC was $35, for my HX it was $95!
Actually, I own and use a number of classic (and not so classic) computers in addition to the HX. including: CoCo3, ADAM, C64, Atari XE, Apple II and Apple IIe. Most of these sit in the same area with my game systems.

[Mospeda]

Chuckle all you want folks, but one day we too will be waxing nostalgic about
2.4mhz machines and VGA (scoff! I can't believe this standard hasn't been
elevated yet).


I remember when pops brought home the old AT&T monochrome 8086, then we added the 1200 baud modem, then the ega, then i got on a bbs
and then we had a virus.. then we had the 20 meg mammoth hard drive..
then we had another virus.. O_O


then came the apex of my gaming world, the 386 clone with a blazing 33 megahertz of fury. Ahhh the days.

[SoulBlazer]

Heh, a lot of found memories in this thread.

My first console was a Atari 2600 and I knew how to use a Apple II due to school, but our first computer was a C128D bought for Christmas 84. It was our only computer till we got a 386 in 1988. And even then, the Commodore was the better machine until we got a Gateway 486/66 for Christmas of 1992 and then Prodigy a few months later.

Yeah, I loved my Commodore -- but it DID forever to load games.....and forgot about trying to load TAPE games! I could go watch a TV program or eat a meal in the course it took to load that stuff!

And for those of you too young to remember the 'oh-so-fun' days of fiddling around with DOS to get games working right, or tweaking QEMM to get the most out of your memory, or playing around with dipsticks on your sound card in order to get the right IRQ settings -- you're spoiled! :D Good riddence and rest in peace!

[AB Positive]

I was lucky in 1992 to be the recipient of a Tandy XT-1000 with a screaming fast 286 processor in glorious DOS. Along with about 14 of those old style TSR D&D games. Forgotten Realms style. I spent two summers tossing between that and Mortal Kombat on the Genesis on my B&W television. man I loved those days. :-D

and then I got a B&W mac second hand from... somebody. Can't remember but it came preloaded with EVERY INFOCOM GAME EVER installed. That took me another two years to work through, heh.

-AG

[calthaer]

Ah, now these are great games, people!

I almost concur with the memory fiddling in DOS - but still, it was a pain. Zone66 was one of the worst ones, the game wouldn't run without a certain amount of Extended or Expanded, I don't remember. Does anybody remember when MS DOS 6.22 introduced MEMMAKER? Oh man, the heaven! Just type it in and your memory goes WHAZOO! I have to get the old DOS machine working so that I can play some classic DOS games. Maniac Mansion, Jordan vs. Bird...ah people are mentioning the classics...

BUT - nobody has mentioned the Bard's Tale! Come on that game is the granddaddy of all that is right in PC gaming. What a classic, even if it was sort of a mindless dungeon crawl. And what about Ultima? What about all those classic Epyx games?

Did anyone ever play Scorched Earth or StarGoose?

A game that I only found recently but which is definitely a DOS classic is the game Celtic Tales: The Evil Eye of Balor by Koei. I think you can probably find it on some abandonware site somewhere...I can give it if somebody wants it. Primitive graphics but that is a great game. Almost an RTS with heroes and resource management and spells and items and such.

And you know the real funny thing? You laugh about how weak all those old PCs used to be, but a lot of modern consoles almost as weak in terms of processor speed and memory.

[YoshiM]

And for those of you too young to remember the 'oh-so-fun' days of fiddling around with DOS to get games working right, or tweaking QEMM to get the most out of your memory, or playing around with dipsticks on your sound card in order to get the right IRQ settings -- you're spoiled! :D Good riddence and rest in peace!

O gawd I forgot about dip switches! Never had that with sound cards, just jumpers. My 8088 had dip switches- settings for floppy, hard drive, etc. That I do agree: good riddance.

@calthaer: Unfortunately, I never played an actual Bard's Tale game. I had the Construction Set and that was pretty interesting until the program destroyed the game I was working on. When I first got into PC gaming I bought a lot of budget titles and a lot were either adventure (Sierra, etc.) or simulation.

[ventrra]

BUT - nobody has mentioned the Bard's Tale! Come on that game is the granddaddy of all that is right in PC gaming. What a classic, even if it was sort of a mindless dungeon crawl. And what about Ultima? What about all those classic Epyx games?

And you know the real funny thing? You laugh about how weak all those old PCs used to be, but a lot of modern consoles almost as weak in terms of processor speed and memory.
Ah...Bard's Tale! I have Bard's Tale I and II somewhere along with Dragon Wars. I still like the fact that you could get enemies to join your party for a while and fight along side instead of against you.

Some of those consoles make decent retro computers, though. :D


O gawd I forgot about dip switches! Never had that with sound cards, just jumpers. My 8088 had dip switches- settings for floppy, hard drive, etc. That I do agree: good riddance.
I never had a problem with that, myself. The only problem I had with IRQ settings was when I started using Windows. :roll: